I am not a hardcore gamer. Two or three times a month I'll fire up the X Box and play for a few hours. I enjoy games like the Call To Duty series, or Ghost Recon 2. Buying these games new at $50-$60 doesn't make sense to me. I'm more than happy to pay $15-$20 at the mall for a used game. The few times I have paid the $50-$60 cost of a new game, I've deeply regretted it and won't let it happen again.
If new games were in the $20-$25 range, I'd have a lot more games (and probably play more often).
Now the real question is, are there enough guys like me out there to justify charging half as much for the game to make the profit on volume?
And how much less will resellers have to charge for a used game at that point? Is it even worth it for them to sell used games at $10?
Big cities actually make it harder to triangulate. Not only is it harder to get a GPS fix in a skyscraper canyon (if your phone uses GPS), it does weird things to RF as well (causing bounces).
Suburbia is a lot easier to deal with than a big city.
"visit the EFF's legal victories page [eff.org], and you'll see several wins that Bonhomie conveniently failed to mention."
I'm pro-EFF, but as a matter of full disclosure, it would be nice to have the EFF also maintain a page of legal spankings it took, lessons learned, that sort of thing.
1) Drop the DRM 2) Distribute at full resolution, not tiny iPod size
I would pay for it. I would love to have my MythTV subscribe to the full HD episodes of Battlestar Galactica and let my tuner grab some less important shows. I would pay $3 or $4 per episode, every week, for the convenience of this. I can think of a few other shows that I'd be willing to pay for to download to my MythTV without commercials, without the little station bug in the bottom right corner, and in full HD glory.
ISP's should be protecting their own networks. Saved bandwidth costs alone should be enough reason for them to want to detect and block zombies. The last thing we need is more government intervention.
Safe cigarettes won't catch on.
on
Safe Cigarettes?
·
· Score: 1
It's been tried before. I own a bunch of land, a former tobacco farm in fact, a couple of miles away from Vector Tobacco in Person County, North Carolina. Their clame to fame years ago was tobacco that tastes the same as what you're used to, but with negligible amounts of nicotine. Here we are, years later, and most smokers have still never heard of the stuff.
Yet every time I head out to grab a couple of pints with the boys, hot young girls in tight pants and Marlboro shirts are out there trying to get men to stick to their brand. I can't tell you how many free Zippo lighters I get from these girls. Fat chance I'll switch from a pipe to Marlboros, though...
To be mainstream it will have to lose many of the features that make it attractive to tech enthusiasts.
If you want a very nice and easy to use *NIX desktop, head down to the Apple store.
DICOM is your friend
on
Film to X-rays?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Most radiology practices have been moving to digital imaging, and have access to scanners that will convert your X-rays into a DICOM image. There are tools out there for converting DICOM to JPEG. And yes these are diagnostic-quality images. I've set up some facilities that don't even go to film anymore unless the patient asks specifically for a film copy. All diagnosis is done on screen.
There are still some stone age practitioners who refuse to move into the digital age. Before getting radiology work done, you might call around to see if the practice is on a "PACS" system. And furthermore, will they give you the images in DICOM format?
One of the hospitals I set up sent every patient home with a CD-R that had a royalty-free DICOM image viewer and the full study of their X-Rays, CT scan, MRI, etc. This way they could pop the CD into a Windows computer and see everything the doctor sees (sort of... some of the advanced image manipulation isn't there) and take the CD to their primary care practitioner for followup.
I think there are a lot of Americans collectively wishing for either Mexico to take it back, or to have it fall into the sea. Best case scenario, both would happen, and in that order.
people wearing little blue hats and driving Nissan Patrols will come knocking on your door
I don't know if the rest of the world is aware, or even a lot of Americans who don't know about life in the Red Zone (aka outside of the Blue Zone), but there is a significant minority in America of well armed patriots who have vowed to shoot at anyone on American soil wearing a blue helmet, equating it to a foreign invasion.
I RTFA. I was taking issue with your choice of most well known sniper (most of his kills were taken with a machine gun, by his own admission). An excellent rifleman? Maybe. But a sniper? Sometimes, but usually not.
the most famous sniper of all time used a mosin-nagant m28
Actually, no, he used a Russian Mosin-Nagant M91/30 which is far and away better than its little brother, the M44.
As for Simo Häyhä, he's virtually unknown, even in sniper circles (although it is pretty well accepted that the Finnish Mosin Nagants were far superior to the Russian models).
It bothered me to no end every time the "Assault Weapons Ban" issue came up in the media that they would just regurgitate the same crap that the pro-ban senators were vomiting up without actually checking the facts and realizing that the crap that these senators were talking about was ALREADY BANNED (and still is) and the legislation they were trying to pass was for something completely different than what they were telling reporters. But the reporters didn't bother to check. So here we are, a year later, and I have yet to see blood in the streets or machine guns at the local gun shop (at least for under $10,000 anyway). The reporters completely goofed it for the most part.
There is so much intrigue around the role of a sniper that sometimes I think reporters are a little eager to use the word when it really doesn't make sense. This article was one example.
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a.30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle [...]"
Never trust a journalist to get gun facts straight.
The M44 is a carbine version of the Mosin-Nagant, very short, easy to carry, but with nothing better than iron sights. It is about as far from a "sniper rifle" as anything you can see.
It has the coolest integral bayonet, though.
On the upside, the M-44 uses the same cartridge as the current Romanian "sniper" rifle, the PSL. The M44 has a short barrel so a steel-cored 7.62x54R projectile won't reach the same sort of velocities as it would out of a PSL rifle but it should be a pretty effective test against the sort of "armor piercing" light arms that any terrorist not carrying an RPG would be likely to have handy.
Nigeria was initially slow to respond to the problem of '419' e-mail scammers operating in the country, who were duping unsuspecting Internet users out of thousands of pounds by promising a share of the secret multimillion-pound fortune of a deposed African dictator.
What about censorship software? Can anybody come up with a hypothetical situation where it benefits the oh-so-slippery "common good?"
Absolutely. I don't want my pre-schooler checking out thehun.net when she's at school.
For all y'all who want to make a gun comparison, here's mine: it would be like David Duke going to Smith and Wesson and saying "I need to put down some darkies and your garden-variety black market assault rifle just won't cut it. Can you make me something more powerful?"
No, it's more like David Duke going to Armalite and buying the AR-50 without explanation because it already has the utility level he's looking for. He doesn't explain to Armalite what he wants to do with it, and they don't care.
The gun manufacturer has a veil of plausable deniability: they "don't know" where their weapons are going or how they're going to be used.
Further, the overwhelming majority of guns sold are used for benevolent purposes: law enforcement, self defense, hunting, collecting, marksmanship. The same is probably true of censorship software.
I would love to see Apple make iTunes work in a more friendly way with third party applications. For example, use iTunes to pull video from your MythTV down to your iPod.
The price point of the iPod has kept me away for a long time, but if I can start watching videos on it, I might finally break down and blow the dust out of my wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a hardcore gamer. Two or three times a month I'll fire up the X Box and play for a few hours. I enjoy games like the Call To Duty series, or Ghost Recon 2. Buying these games new at $50-$60 doesn't make sense to me. I'm more than happy to pay $15-$20 at the mall for a used game. The few times I have paid the $50-$60 cost of a new game, I've deeply regretted it and won't let it happen again.
If new games were in the $20-$25 range, I'd have a lot more games (and probably play more often).
Now the real question is, are there enough guys like me out there to justify charging half as much for the game to make the profit on volume?
And how much less will resellers have to charge for a used game at that point? Is it even worth it for them to sell used games at $10?
Big cities actually make it harder to triangulate. Not only is it harder to get a GPS fix in a skyscraper canyon (if your phone uses GPS), it does weird things to RF as well (causing bounces).
Suburbia is a lot easier to deal with than a big city.
Because I am contractually obligated to not divulge company secrets. Duh.
It's a lot closer than that. I used to work for one of the companies that designed this technology.
...stop slacking off, do your job, and break stuff on your own time with your own crap.
"visit the EFF's legal victories page [eff.org], and you'll see several wins that Bonhomie conveniently failed to mention."
I'm pro-EFF, but as a matter of full disclosure, it would be nice to have the EFF also maintain a page of legal spankings it took, lessons learned, that sort of thing.
If they would:
1) Drop the DRM
2) Distribute at full resolution, not tiny iPod size
I would pay for it. I would love to have my MythTV subscribe to the full HD episodes of Battlestar Galactica and let my tuner grab some less important shows. I would pay $3 or $4 per episode, every week, for the convenience of this. I can think of a few other shows that I'd be willing to pay for to download to my MythTV without commercials, without the little station bug in the bottom right corner, and in full HD glory.
That is because the Serious coumputing crowd is already using Solaris :)
No, we dropped the Solaris boxes for Linux awhile ago (and haven't looked back).
Hopefully never. Well, U.S. regulators anyway.
ISP's should be protecting their own networks. Saved bandwidth costs alone should be enough reason for them to want to detect and block zombies. The last thing we need is more government intervention.
...making me the victor. </wimplo>
It's been tried before. I own a bunch of land, a former tobacco farm in fact, a couple of miles away from Vector Tobacco in Person County, North Carolina. Their clame to fame years ago was tobacco that tastes the same as what you're used to, but with negligible amounts of nicotine. Here we are, years later, and most smokers have still never heard of the stuff.
Yet every time I head out to grab a couple of pints with the boys, hot young girls in tight pants and Marlboro shirts are out there trying to get men to stick to their brand. I can't tell you how many free Zippo lighters I get from these girls. Fat chance I'll switch from a pipe to Marlboros, though...
To be mainstream it will have to lose many of the features that make it attractive to tech enthusiasts.
If you want a very nice and easy to use *NIX desktop, head down to the Apple store.
Most radiology practices have been moving to digital imaging, and have access to scanners that will convert your X-rays into a DICOM image. There are tools out there for converting DICOM to JPEG. And yes these are diagnostic-quality images. I've set up some facilities that don't even go to film anymore unless the patient asks specifically for a film copy. All diagnosis is done on screen.
There are still some stone age practitioners who refuse to move into the digital age. Before getting radiology work done, you might call around to see if the practice is on a "PACS" system. And furthermore, will they give you the images in DICOM format?
One of the hospitals I set up sent every patient home with a CD-R that had a royalty-free DICOM image viewer and the full study of their X-Rays, CT scan, MRI, etc. This way they could pop the CD into a Windows computer and see everything the doctor sees (sort of... some of the advanced image manipulation isn't there) and take the CD to their primary care practitioner for followup.
We disowned California a long time ago.
I think there are a lot of Americans collectively wishing for either Mexico to take it back, or to have it fall into the sea. Best case scenario, both would happen, and in that order.
people wearing little blue hats and driving Nissan Patrols will come knocking on your door
I don't know if the rest of the world is aware, or even a lot of Americans who don't know about life in the Red Zone (aka outside of the Blue Zone), but there is a significant minority in America of well armed patriots who have vowed to shoot at anyone on American soil wearing a blue helmet, equating it to a foreign invasion.
Facts you proved me wrong about?
Sorry, Mr. Penis Cleaver, I didn't get your telepathic message. Perhaps you were thinking with the little head again.
I RTFA. I was taking issue with your choice of most well known sniper (most of his kills were taken with a machine gun, by his own admission). An excellent rifleman? Maybe. But a sniper? Sometimes, but usually not.
the most famous sniper of all time used a mosin-nagant m28
Actually, no, he used a Russian Mosin-Nagant M91/30 which is far and away better than its little brother, the M44.
As for Simo Häyhä, he's virtually unknown, even in sniper circles (although it is pretty well accepted that the Finnish Mosin Nagants were far superior to the Russian models).
Fair enough. :-)
It bothered me to no end every time the "Assault Weapons Ban" issue came up in the media that they would just regurgitate the same crap that the pro-ban senators were vomiting up without actually checking the facts and realizing that the crap that these senators were talking about was ALREADY BANNED (and still is) and the legislation they were trying to pass was for something completely different than what they were telling reporters. But the reporters didn't bother to check. So here we are, a year later, and I have yet to see blood in the streets or machine guns at the local gun shop (at least for under $10,000 anyway). The reporters completely goofed it for the most part.
There is so much intrigue around the role of a sniper that sometimes I think reporters are a little eager to use the word when it really doesn't make sense. This article was one example.
Compare and contrast...
Russian Mosin-Nagant M-44 - Does this look remotely like a sniper rifle?
Savage 10FP-LE2 "sniper" rifle - This is what the professionals in law enforcement often turn to.
I've got both of these in my collection. I love the M44 but the idea of sharpshooting with it, let alone sniping, is laughable.
"In a June 2004demonstration, an ALONtm test pieces held up to both a .30 caliber Russian M-44 sniper rifle [...]"
Never trust a journalist to get gun facts straight.
The M44 is a carbine version of the Mosin-Nagant, very short, easy to carry, but with nothing better than iron sights. It is about as far from a "sniper rifle" as anything you can see.
It has the coolest integral bayonet, though.
On the upside, the M-44 uses the same cartridge as the current Romanian "sniper" rifle, the PSL. The M44 has a short barrel so a steel-cored 7.62x54R projectile won't reach the same sort of velocities as it would out of a PSL rifle but it should be a pretty effective test against the sort of "armor piercing" light arms that any terrorist not carrying an RPG would be likely to have handy.
...the EU demands that the US cede control of the Global Positioning System.
Nigeria was initially slow to respond to the problem of '419' e-mail scammers operating in the country, who were duping unsuspecting Internet users out of thousands of pounds by promising a share of the secret multimillion-pound fortune of a deposed African dictator.
At least they are combating the obesity epidemic.
What about censorship software? Can anybody come up with a hypothetical situation where it benefits the oh-so-slippery "common good?"
Absolutely. I don't want my pre-schooler checking out thehun.net when she's at school.
For all y'all who want to make a gun comparison, here's mine: it would be like David Duke going to Smith and Wesson and saying "I need to put down some darkies and your garden-variety black market assault rifle just won't cut it. Can you make me something more powerful?"
No, it's more like David Duke going to Armalite and buying the AR-50 without explanation because it already has the utility level he's looking for. He doesn't explain to Armalite what he wants to do with it, and they don't care.
The gun manufacturer has a veil of plausable deniability: they "don't know" where their weapons are going or how they're going to be used.
Further, the overwhelming majority of guns sold are used for benevolent purposes: law enforcement, self defense, hunting, collecting, marksmanship. The same is probably true of censorship software.
Don't blame the tool for the way it's used, or the company that made the tool. Blame the jerkoff who is misusing the tool.
I would love to see Apple make iTunes work in a more friendly way with third party applications. For example, use iTunes to pull video from your MythTV down to your iPod.
The price point of the iPod has kept me away for a long time, but if I can start watching videos on it, I might finally break down and blow the dust out of my wallet.